Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Five years since the snake

Now this is old school: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/120321
It's hard to believe that five years ago was when I first saw this flash video. While you are there, check out the Magical Trevors, oh so very clever lyrics :D

Monday I biked to work, and it was perfect weather biking in the morning with a sunny ride home. The only problem was my front rack came loose while biking home. I have still yet to fix it, or rather even take a closer look at it (not sure if it stripped the braze on).

Last Thursday/Friday I saw Batman the Dark Night at the Rave downtown Kalamazoo. It was my first time at the Rave, I liked the theater and the movie. I'm not sure if the theater what any better than Celebration Cinema (however my friends are all tall and they say the seats are better at the Rave). Afterwards I hung out on a roof and looked at the stars with my good friend Ryan. The weather was a bit cloudy but stars were still out and the temperature was cool. Stargazing was well worth the quick 5 hour power nap until work the next morning.

Many people say, oh it's a nice day out, it's a shame to be inside working or what-not. I would content to argue the same thing about the night. Many nights are amazing with a starry spectacle in the sky. My question: how can you stay sleeping with the starry sky spectacle?

Currently listening to The Meters. Time to funk it up!

Monday, July 28, 2008

Other than work

Time for a post that is not related to work. While looking at photos of f-22 raptors, I came across James Gordon's flickr photos [ http://flickr.com/photos/jamesdale10/ ]. He has taken countless amazing pictures not only of f-22's, but many other things primarily related to the government. They are so good, you should really be looking at those pictures and not reading this post right now.

cheers.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Prereq

To install PerformancePoint Add-In for Excel, windows needs the following installed:

ADOMD.NET 9.0 SP2
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=93296

Analysis Services 9.0 OLE DB Provider (SP2)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=93298


Or rather, in order to connect to a cube in asp.net, the above providers might be helpful.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Setting up WCF web service

While setting up a new project I ran into the following issue with a WCF web service that needed to pass data to a silverlight application.



The type of errors I was recieving:

Content Type application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8 was not supported by service


System.InvalidOperationException: An exception was thrown in a call to a WSDL export extension: System.ServiceModel.Description.DataContractSerializerOperationBehavior contract: CubeService ----> System.Runtime.Serialization.InvalidDataContractException: Type 'GraphDataClass' cannot be serialized. Consider marking it with the DataContractAttribute attribute, and marking all of its members you want serialized with the DataMemberAttribute attribute.


The problem is with the class contracts not matching and being unable to be serialized (or something along that effect)

Start by including
Imports System.Runtime.Serialization
-for examples [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.serialization.datamemberattribute.aspx]

Give the class and properties the according contract information (See image below or example above)



That should allow you to add the WCF as a web service reference/fix the errors. Comment if you have questions on it, because I'm just briefly going over the problem/solution.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Note to self

Silverlight dynamic graph with data from webservice - check
Pull data from cube - AMO, sweet! (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345092.aspx)

Almost another check!

Silverlight: Beware of the Contract

WCF webservice in a silverlight project debugging.


Project build will succeed with 1 warning:

Warning 1 Custom tool warning: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.


This warning refers to the file Reference.svcmap Line 1 Column 1.


When you do run the project you will get:

The remote server returned an unexpected response: (404) Not Found.


This is a pretty good indicator that the web service is not being found. Why? It's looking in the wrong place of course. This is the second time that ServiceReferences.ClientConfig has caused me problems. The solution to resolve the above errors is to simply open up the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig in you Silverlight application, and point the to the correct location of your webservice. Last time I had my project open, the service was running on port 1786, now the port changed to 1408, thus an entirely different location.



Another place to look is under the Web.config file in the website project. Look for all the endpoint addresses, and check to make sure they are correct.
Hope this post helps your debug! Cheers

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Sunlite

I have taken upon the task to tune up an old sunlite drumset for Camp Michawana. The set required 3 drum heads to be replaced and a total of 10 heads that need to be tuned. A couple weeks ago I bought the DrumDial tuner. The DrumDial tuner seems overly expensive to me, but I do admit, it has helped me tune heads better. I will do a post later on how I have used it to tune drums better. I wanted to say on this post that any kit can sound good with a decent set of drum heads and most importantly, tuned. Tuning drums is tedious, but spending the time to get all the drums tuned correctly is vital if you want to have a drum set sound like a drum set.

In the past, I just presumed my drum kit sounded bad because it was cheap and had some cheap heads. I picked up some new heads and it helped the sound, but it was not until I spent some real time in tuning before they sounded REALLY good. One can buy an expensive drum set, but the expensive part is primarily the looks and quality of hardware. Quality hardware does not equate to a quality sound, though it may allow you to get a quality sound easier.

I'll discuss how to get a quality sound more when I explain my insights on tuning.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

In to the movies

Batoru Rowaiaru, or also known as Battle Royale, is a Japanese film exploring the fanatical concept of extreme punishment. A class of students is manipulated to a last man standing deathmatch "game" on a deserted island. The movie gives a perspective on friendship and enmity between fellow students. Self greed is a motif that leads to the death of nearly each individual.

A true friendship is developed between the characters Shuya Nanahara (boy #15) and Noriko Nakagawa (girl #15). The friendship is based on trust with Shuya and Noriko both willing to sacrifice themselves for the other. Shuya is willing to risk his life to distract Kazuo's fire and cover for Kawada and Noriko. Noriko risks her life nearing a "danger zone" in order to meet wounded Shuya.

Shuya and Noriko's relationship is continually contrasted with the relationships of the other classmates. I am not about to attempt to figure out the names and go into detail because if you haven't noticed already, the names are not names easily recalled. Keep a look out for the student combinations that are:
1) Outwardly and inwardly enemies
2) Outwardly friends and inwardly enemies
3) Inwardly wanting to know each other, but never interacted before (Hiroki trying to find secret love Shinji)

The contrast between the relationships makes my second point more apparent. Self greed leads to death of the student. Self greed found in revenge (both times the girls are in the hut), sex (the one dude trying to hook up with the running girl), comfort (2 girls seeking peace), and the list can go on.

Self greed leads to death/losing the game = bad. Altruism leads to life/winning the game = good. This is way more than I had originally planned on discussing this movie and there is great deal more that could use some expounding. Maybe you should just watch the movie instead, or just ask me if you are interested. The ultimate/underlying question of the movie Battle Royale: Is there more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking?